The Philosopher, the Rabbi, and the Rhetorician

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The Philosopher, the Rabbi,
and the Rhetorician
Susan Handelman
The question is the following: to receive what one has not merited—that is hell. The verse says:
“The righteous hate gifts” (Proverbs 15:27). Do you know why? It’s because they have to give
them back. In most religions, by contrast, the gift of existence is a grace received. But the fact of
having received without having merited—that is hell. It is what one calls a union of repulsion:
the one who receives returns it, refuses, until the back-and-forth of the light makes the vessel
sufficiently refined to be capable of receiving. I would like to tell you how this is taught on the
level of the Talmud: the one who receives, gives more to the one who gives, than the one who
gives to the one who receives. In what’s happening right now, when I am speaking, I am the
subject and you are the object; and when you listen, I am the object and you are the subject. It’s
necessary that something reciprocal occurs, a restoration of the dignity of the other, as Kant said.
You have to receive in such a way that restores my dignity as the giver, but I have to give in
such a way that restores your dignity as receiver. Otherwise, there is refusal. For that reason,
from time to time, I make you laugh.
—Rabbi Yéhouda Léon Askenazi (Manitou), “Le ‘cercle’ et la ‘droite’” (159)1
I
’m grateful for the chance to write on “Jewish rhetoric” for this special issue of
College English, but I confess my initial perplexity about how to approach the
topic. Defining either of those terms—Jewish or rhetoric—is difficult enough,
let alone when they are conjoined. Harold Bloom once impishly described
the term “Jewish-American Culture” as similar to “Holy Roman Empire”: it was
neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire (108).
Susan Han d e l m a n is professor of English at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where she moved in fall
2000. Before that, she taught for twenty years in the English department at the University of Maryland,
College Park. She is the author of The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern
Literary Theory (1982); Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem,
and Levinas (1991); and the forthcoming “Make Yourself a Teacher”: Rabbinic Tales of Mentors and Disciples.
She has edited collections on psychoanalysis and religion, contemporary Jewish education, and women’s
interpretations of classical Jewish texts. She has also written many essays in the areas of literary theory,
pedagogy, and Jewish thought.
College English, Volume 72, Number 6, July 2010
Copyright © 2010 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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So I have chosen to define rhetoric here in its broadest sense, following Wayne
Booth in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, published in 2004, a year before he died. Rhetoric,
writes Booth, is
the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another:
effects ethical (including everything about character), practical (including political),
emotional (including aesthetic), and intellectual including every academic field. It is the
entire range of our use of “signs” for communicating effectively or sloppily, ethically
or immorally. At its worst, it is our most harmful miseducator—except for violence.
But at its best—when we learn to listen to the “other,” and listen to ourselves and
thus manage to respond in a way that produces genuine dialogue—it is our primary
resource for avoiding violence and building community. (xi, xii)
As to Jewish rhetoric, I’ve decided not to address the question here through any
historical survey, or by examining specific Jewish rhetorical practices, as important as
those approaches are. Rather, I want to look at it in terms of Booth’s definition and
focus on the ethical relation to “the other.” That relation, of course, has also been
a central preoccupation of postmodern thought. In current academic discourse, the
phrase the other has just about attained the rhetorical status of a Burkean God-term—a
term that represents an ultimate value, organizing and stabilizing a community and
its ideology through its invocation.
Kenneth Burke’s own work is filled with awareness of the theological, and his
Rhetoric of Religion (1961) was a turning point in his thinking. Booth himself came
from a Mormon background, and the final chapter of The Rhetoric of Rhetoric tries to
establish the commonplaces between rhetoric and religion. Both Booth’s and Burke’s
notions of religion, though, are rooted in Western-Christian cultural and religious
discourse. How would Jewish ethical-religious discourse contribute to rhetorical
theory? To explore that question, I have chosen the long quotation by Rabbi Yéhouda
Léon Askenazi as the epigraph to this essay. It encapsulates much of what I want to
say here about rhetoric, Judaism, philosophy, critical theory, and current thinking
about the other. And, in particular, problems with the influential idea put forth by
Emmanuel Levinas that the founding moment of epistemology and ethics is the
“priority of the other.” Needless to say, how we think about the other has profound
implications not only for rhetorical theory, but for our politics and pedagogy as we
struggle with the dilemmas of this new millennium.
“You Create
the
Books
and
I’ll Create
the
Readers”
First, some background. Although Levinas is far better known and more influential
in the English-speaking world, Askenazi is just now being translated from French
to Hebrew (and soon into English). He is also better known by the totem nickname
Manitou he was given as a young man in the French-Jewish scouting movement
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(Éclaireurs Israélites de France). This is a Native American word meaning “spirit.”
It stuck to him for the rest of his life, and is the name by which he is still commonly
known, so I’ll use it in this essay.2 During the Nazi period, both Levinas and Manitou
underwent major personal and intellectual traumas that profoundly affected the rest
of their lives. Each spent the remainder of his career addressing the cultural and moral
collapse of Europe in World War II, rebuilding the Jewish community in France,
and intellectually restructuring the relations among Judaism, philosophy, and ethics.
Levinas, born in 1906, came from an intellectual Russian-Jewish family to study
philosophy in Germany and France with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in
the 1920s and 1930s. Manitou, born sixteen years later, came from French-Colonial
Oran in Algeria, and from a long line of rabbis and kabbalists. Both suffered under
German occupation and fought in the French army during the war. Directly afterward, each spent many years teaching in and directing Jewish schools for youth in
Paris. They were colleagues and prominent speakers at the annual Colloquium of
French-Jewish Intellectuals, delivering lectures on biblical and rabbinic topics in light
of contemporary issues. Along with André Neher and Éliane Amado Lévi-Valensi,
they constituted the Parisian School of Jewish Thought (L’École juive de Paris) in
the 1950s. It was a remarkable moment in modern Jewish intellectual history.
Levinas entered the French academy in 1961 as a philosophy professor (he was
then fifty-five years old), while Manitou purposely chose not to have a university
career. In responding once to Neher’s urging him to write a book, Manitou answered,
“Let’s make a deal: You create the books and I’ll create the readers” (qtd. in Aviner
24). He remained an educator and institution builder in France until his emigration
to Israel in 1968, where he continued his work. He was known as a consummate
teacher and master of oral discourse. But there are also many volumes of his collected
essays and lectures, running to thousands of pages. These two luminaries—Levinas
and Manitou—died within a year of each other, in 1995 and 1996.
In the rest of this essay, I will return to the quotation of Manitou that I use
as the epigraph to elicit a notion of Jewish rhetoric. In the concluding section, I’ll
bring to the discussion another great French-speaking Jewish intellectual of the same
generation, one whose work was also deeply affected by the Nazi period: Chaim
Perelman (1912–84). Perelman was a Jew from Poland who became a Belgian citizen,
and was the youngest person to become a professor at the University of Brussels.
His “turn to rhetoric” after the war, culminating in his influential masterwork The
New Rhetoric (with coauthor Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca), was part of his own intense
search for an answer to the problem of values, and the violence in Western thought.
His endeavors, though, were not only intellectual: forced to resign his position at
the university due to the Nuremberg laws, and to hide his own young daughter to
save her life, he became a leader in the Belgian resistance movement along with his
wife Fela. Together they saved thousands of Jews at great personal risk, and retained
strong ties to Israel to the end of their lives.3
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In their own ways, the “philosopher” Levinas, the “rabbi” Manitou, and the
“rhetorician” Perelman partook of all three of those identities. Each came to view
ethics as prior to philosophy, and understood that position as fundamentally Jewish.
Levinas and Manitou, though, differed radically in defining the ethical relation to
the other, and of Judaism to philosophy. Before going further, a caveat: extracting
these thinkers’ ideas from their own rich rhetorical context inevitably does them an
injustice. Given my limited space here, I can touch on the complex issues only in
very general and reductive terms.
As to rhetoric, Levinas speaks little of it directly, but retains the classical philosopher’s suspicion of rhetoric as sophistic manipulation. One could see why. If
rhetoric involves an attempt to persuade or influence the other, then the other is still
being treated as a means, and rhetoric is enmeshed in the cycle of adversarial power
relationships Levinas wants to uproot from the foundations of philosophy in order
to find a way out of the violence plaguing Western thought.4 So the Levinasian other
is an entirely “other / otherwise than being” that disrupts the narcissistic enclosure
of Being and self. The relation to the other, for him, must be asymmetrical: subjectivity is defined and constructed through being “subject to,” “hostage” to the other
(in Levinas’s later terms), and bears absolute responsibility for the other, even for
the faults of the other.
Manitou maintains that the asymmetrical relationship does not solve the problem
of violence. Because now violence is being done to the self, the “subject,” which has
to sacrifice entirely for the other. Instead, the main problem of religion, ethics, and
philosophy is finding a solution where the other is neither placed higher, made utterly
absolute or transcendent (or a God-term), nor placed lower. Both positions involve
domination. The solution to violence can be found only in reciprocity, a kind of
“equation of fraternity,” as Manitou terms it. This is not a formal or mathematical
equation, but an equilibrium, a balance, a particular way of giving and receiving that
maintains the dignity of each. One is not hostage to the other. For Manitou, achieving that fraternity is also the heart of Jewish teaching about the nature of Creation,
and is the purpose of history. From the first stories of the Book of Genesis to the last
pages of Chronicles, the biblical narrative details the “conflict of siblings” (brothers,
sisters, families, tribes, and nations) and the ongoing generations’ attempts to resolve
it. This is an unfinished historical process in which we are still embroiled.
Like Levinas, Manitou does not write much about rhetoric directly, but there
is an extraordinary moment of Jewish rhetorical consciousness in the quotation I
have chosen for the epigraph. It comes at a special moment in a long lecture Manitou is giving to a general audience, in which he is introducing complex kabbalistic
ideas about Creation. At a certain moment, he interrupts his talk and requests that
someone ask a question “so we can breathe a little” (158). A question is asked, which
Manitou then clarifies by defining his own rhetorical situation in speaking to the
audience attending the lecture. This situation, and his reflections on it, not only
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illustrate but also enact the very kabbalistic idea he is trying to convey. It’s also a
pedagogical moment par excellence. More poignantly, it comes from one of the very
last lectures Manitou gave in 1996, even as he was quite ill. He was in the middle of
editing it when he died.
The structure of the quotation also enacts his larger religious, philosophical,
and educational project: he cites a verse from Hebrew scripture, “translates it” psychologically and philosophically into Western categories, then “retranslates it” into
specifically Jewish categories of thought from the Jewish legal and mystical traditions,
Talmud and Kabbalah. At the same time, the retranslation critiques the limits of the
Western philosophical categories and supersedes them. And, characteristic of Manitou’s personal style, it is framed with humor at the beginning and the end. There is
a simultaneous coalescence of the several levels, even as he expresses complex ideas
in seemingly simple terms.5 Were I to try to unravel all those different levels with
the background each requires, I would need several times the length I’m allotted
here. So I will focus on these questions: How does Manitou’s rhetorical situation as
a speaker in front of an audience parallel the kabbalistic cosmological process, and at
the same time coincide with fundamental principles of ethics in relation to the other?
Where do these initial “dualisms” of self and other, subject and object, speaker and
audience, and the tensions between them come from? How are they resolved? My
method of proceeding is itself a classically Jewish rhetorical one: a kind of nonlinear
midrashic exegesis where I am line-by-line glossing, explaining, commenting, and
elaborating on a passage whose every word or phrase is assumed to have many levels
of meaning. I, too, will be the philosopher, the rabbi, and the rhetorician.
C o s m o l o g y a n d E t h ic s : T h e S e l f / O t h e r ,
Subject/Object Problem
One of the great insights of kabbalistic tradition is that Creation occurs not through
expansion or “revelation,” but through God’s contraction and concealment (tzimtzum)
of his “infinite presence” or “light ” in order to “make space” for a finite world.
Otherwise, there would be no room for an other, nothing but God. To create and
make space for an other, “to give birth” to something other than self, is the fundamental moral act, as Manitou and Levinas both stress. But for Manitou, that is only
part of it. To really make a place for the other also means a reciprocity, to allow the
other to give back, to share in the work of creation, and to merit the gift of existence.
Otherwise what “place” does the other really have—aside from passive recipient?
Though it might sound abstract, this cosmological process is embodied in the
simple juxtaposition of the very first verse of the Bible with the second one (Gen. 1:1,
2). We are so familiar with the story, Manitou notes, that we don’t ask an obvious
question: why, immediately after, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and
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the earth,” is everything suddenly “waste and void and darkness” in the second verse?
In the narrative, God is not creating ex nihilo, something out of nothing, but the
reverse: out of something, God is making nothing! In other words, the contraction
and concealing of God’s light to create the “empty space,” the “place” for the world
to exist, also create a world of darkness, waste, and wild; an unfinished world, a mix
of good and evil that needs fixing (“Parachat” 12–13). All this occurs long before the
story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. God’s making that
empty space, and not finishing it, intentionally allows for this “chaos” in order to
“give a place” to human beings, a moral place, to share in the process of creation.
This act engenders history with all its turbulence, but also with its goal and purpose: the human spiritual and ethical mending of the world to reach the messianic
goal. So history, despite its upheavals, violence, and darkness is “a drama, but not a
tragedy,” as Manitou eloquently puts it (“Le couple” 209). We are not in the fated,
deterministic world of the Greeks. The word for history in Hebrew is toladot, which
means “generations,” and history as conceived in the Bible is not a succession of
anonymous events, but the ongoing history or “engenderment” of human identities.
Now, I have just condensed some highly complex ideas into a few paragraphs
and left out immense realms of thought. And it’s taken me days to do it, though you
have read it in a few seconds. As writers, we’re all in the position of the Creator in
the Kabbalah: we have to condense the vast array of our thoughts in order for our
audience to be able to receive. There is a constant back-and-forth, expansion and
contraction, as we try both to create our “implied reader” and adjust to the real
reader’s ability to absorb and make the ideas her or his own. Otherwise what we say
will be rejected. The same is true, of course, of all effective pedagogical and rhetorical
acts.6 But what is the ethic of this relation? When is it manipulation? What is the
cost of the diminution? When is there a mutuality of respect? And how can it allow
for the other to be a participant and creator as well?
In the kabbalistic schema, from the point of view of created beings, a profound
existential problem results. To be created, to exist, one has to be other than God. But
not being equivalent to God is to be “diminished.” And that also means existing in
a world where there is a gap between the current difficult realities of existence—the
“waste and void and darkness” we all live in daily and historically—and the ultimate
messianic goal of a perfected creation and peace we’re laboring to bring about. It
also means that every self/other or subject/object “pair” or “couple” is imbalanced,
as it were: from the male/female pair, to the individual/society pair, to my society/
the other society, to “sibling” couples—brother/brother, sister/sister.
To put it another way, imagine the shape of a triangle. At the top of the triangle
is God, who freely bestows life, and at each bottom corner of the triangle is a creature, a subjectivity, a self. On the one hand, each creature desires a full subjectivity,
to fully be, but this also creates inevitable competition between the two to receive
all the goodness from above.
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Four Solutions
to the
Problem
of
Self
and
Other
Manitou was an avid student of anthropology as well as philosophy in Paris, and we
can see this combination in his mapping of the four solutions given in human culture
to this essential problem of self and other.
1.Subject/Object. I prefer to be the subject and make you my object. This is the solution
of totalitarian cultures, and the torment of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Biblically, it
is Cain’s murder of Abel—the paradigm for this position at the beginning of history,
and history’s continuing central problem. Cain and Abel, in Manitou’s reading, are two
“modes of being human,” (“Le couple” 214–15) and each has a different moral problem.
Cain is the first born of the first couple. His name comes from the verb to acquire (kanah)
and indicates his existence is already acquired, given, natural.
The text continues, “and in addition she gave birth to his brother, to Abel” (Gen.
4:1–2). Cain is now faced with the task of making space for this “addition,” this other,
this sibling, to make him feel at home, to not see him as dispensable surplus. Abel, for his
part, is born as an addition, as the other; so he already has the consciousness of being a
brother, and does not need to make an effort to become one. His task? To educate Cain
to be capable of being “someone’s brother” in reciprocity. But he fails, does not know how
to protect himself from Cain, and is killed. In Hebrew, the name for Abel—Hevel—designates what is “fleeting,” like a breath. Cain and Abel, in Manitou’s interpretation, are
“two distinct anthropologies, two kinds of moralities, two radically different theologies
[. . .] two fundamentally different perceptions of the world” (“Le couple” 214–16).
2.Object/Subject. One reaction to this barbarism is to reverse the terms: I will choose
instead to be the object, and you will be the subject. In Hegel’s dialectic, I will be the
slave and you the master. Manitou notes that theoretically, this is the solution chosen by
Christianity: sacrifice of oneself for the other. Theoretically—for while many Christian
saints indeed have lived by that ethic, and monasteries aspired to it, the historical and
political structure of Christian cultures has reverted back to option number one.
3.Object/Object. The third option would be the temptation of mysticism and spirituality
of the East Asia. To avoid the suffering and evil of the subject/object relation, the solution is this: stop history. We will both be objects. Calm and relief of suffering will be
attained by ceasing desire and action; peace comes through contemplation. This is the
greatness of Buddhism, notes Manitou, but also its unreality, because inevitably it also
can live only within the boundaries of history. Buddhist monasteries find themselves
within larger social-political structures that function according to the first solution.
4.Subject/Subject. Both have the honor and dignity of being subjects in mutuality; both are
masters, and both are thereby saved. Without mutuality there is failure. This solution,
Manitou argues, is the one advocated by Jewish teaching, the Torah, and “opposed to
the current of contemporary French-Jewish thought tending towards the second position”: recognition of the other as a subject without reciprocity (qtd. in Aviner 32). This
is his argument with Levinas, for whom the solution to violence is not the “equation
of fraternity” but the “asymmetry of the other.” The other is placed at the top of the
triangle for Levinas, and only insofar as I am the “other of the other” is there any possible reciprocity, or protection of the self.
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“You Shall Love Your Neighbor
as
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Yourself”?
Needless to say, Manitou’s fourfold schema consists of very broad generalizations,
and he recognizes many exceptions. His tendency to schematize, he notes, arises from
his desire to reach the essential issues underlying the large problems (“Parachat”
8). It’s also a pedagogical-rhetorical move adapted to his varied audiences.7 So let’s
move from macro to micro, and look at how this schema applies to the key biblical
verse often translated as “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).
What kind of love is this? How far does it extend? How does it fit into this schema?
As Manitou often emphasized, one cannot separate the language one uses from
the conceptuality that the language and its grammar entail. (That is also part of what
I would call a “rhetorical” approach.) One needs to “return to Hebrew” to understand
the meaning of the text. Interestingly, in the case of this most famous verse, there
is a major grammatical kink. In the usual English translation, “you shall love your
neighbor as yourself,” the word neighbor is the direct object of the verb love. But not
so in Hebrew. The grammatically correct, although awkward, literal translation would
be “you should love to your neighbor like yourself.” The Hebrew preposition used
is leh, meaning “to.” If neighbor were the direct object, the sentence would have had
a different preposition: et, which always marks a definite direct object in Hebrew.
Because English does not have such a particle, the distinction is lost in the translation. But this seemingly minor difference is critical; it also marks the philosophical
difference between Manitou and Levinas.
How so? Manitou argues—with Levinas again as an implicit target—that the
grammatical difference signifies that the neighbor, the other, is not a direct object—
not an absolute. Leh here means “to,” or “through,” or “for the sake of.” The end
of the verse, often not quoted, is “I am God.” So the neighbor is a kind of medium.
Through the neighbor, by one’s behavior and recognition, by making a place for
her or him, one can direct love to God, who has created both equally and desired
the neighbor to exist as much as me. In speaking of the love one should have for
God, the preposition et indeed is used (Deut. 6:5), for only God is the absolute (Sod
ha-Ivri 118–24).
If the sentence is mistranslated, the other—one’s fellow creature—is turned into
a direct object, an absolute. Psychologically, as Manitou notes, we’re familiar with this
phenomenon. A parent can make a child the absolute focus of his or her existence,
and thereby destroy the child’s ability to be independent. Romantic obsession can
do the same to its object, and so forth. So it’s indeed very difficult to maintain this
“equation” or “equilibrium” with the other. In fact, he adds, it’s harder to love the real
neighbor—the noisy next-door tenant, one’s irritating in-law, the rude clerk—than
the distant ideal or exotic other, the one farther away. The very closeness brings the
rivalry. So “you should love your neighbor like yourself” means to exert yourself to
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love the near one, that is, the one “like yourself,” not the distant other. To sum up,
the problem is not the other, but the brother, nor is it the oedipal struggle of father
and son, as in Greek myth.
Philosophically, there is a parallel tendency to make God so completely transcendental and Other, that the mutual relationship between the divine and human
is lost. “God” becomes so impersonal that there is no connection to the world. Or,
the human takes the place of God. Also note well: equation or equilibrium means
that the other must reciprocate by returning the love and respect—another argument
against the asymmetry of the relation in Levinas. When we abandon the subject/
subject position for the subject/object or object/subject position, we ultimately run
the risk of Cain’s murder of Abel.
Haunted by their personal experiences of the collapse of Europe and the slaughter of tens of millions in World War II, Levinas, Manitou, and Perelman hold the
Cain/Abel problem central. Does one solve the problem by attempting to rupture
the self-enclosed narcissistic self, the impersonal philosophy of Being and Identity
as in Levinas (and Jacques Derrida, who was inspired by him)? Where does openness to the other end, and protection of the self begin, asks Manitou. How can one
reason about values and institute justice, asks Perelman. How does one balance the
relation of justice and mercy, or overcome the dualism between them, ask Manitou
and Perelman. In short, how does one combat violence, what are the roots of evil,
how is a just and peaceful society constructed, and what are the limits of love?
In a lecture on the relation of truth and reality, and the roots of good and evil
in kabbalistic cosmology, Manitou notes,
One of my own great teachers, Jacob Gordin, said to us (it was forty-five years ago):
“What is a modern atheist? It is not someone who does not believe in God (because
he really doesn’t know what he is talking about). A modern atheist is someone who
does not believe in evil, who does not believe evil is evil. Of such a person, one needs
to be very wary.” (“Parachat” 12)
Gordin (1896–1947) was a brilliant Russian-Jewish refugee philosopher, Jewish
studies scholar, and key influence on the Parisian School of Jewish Thought. The
Russian Revolution and Civil War caused his displacement in the 1920s from Russia
to Berlin. With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Gordin had to flee to Paris. When
the Germans occupied France, he again escaped, this time from Paris to the French
underground. There he encountered the French-Jewish Scouts, who had become
part of the underground, and became their teacher. He helped them with operations,
and with sheltering and teaching children. Both Levinas, who knew him in Paris,
and Manitou, who met him through the scouts, were deeply affected by Gordin. He
was the teacher of those who after the war would become the teachers of the next
generation of French Jews.8
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Today, as then, the term evil has fallen out of favor, or has been translated into
more secular terms—oppression, racism, fascism, injustice, imperialism, and so forth.
But for thinkers with the personal experiences and philosophical depth of Gordin
and Manitou, evil was real, and pressing. One could not be content with purely
intellectual constructions of the world, or utopian ideologies. A poignant story is
told by another of Gordin’s French students, Emmanuel Raïs, who writes not only
of Gordin’s brilliance, but of the force of his personality. In a discussion about a
certain matter, “I suddenly found myself before a terrible simplicity. He said: ‘If you
think that way, it is because you have not cried enough […]’ and this was one of the
greatest illuminations of my life” (320).
Giver
and
Receiver: Beyond Dualism
to
H o l y R h e t o r ic
All those who are merciful to the cruel in the end will be cruel to the merciful.
—Midrash Kohelet Rabbah (7:16); Tanchuma “Metzora” (1)
To sacrifice to one value is to sacrifice all the others.
—Manitou, “Le sens humain” (538)
Just as one can’t make the other absolute, one can’t make any one value an exclusive
absolute; that itself is a root of evil. Values also need to be in a harmony of reciprocal interaction, united in a way that the classical, ontological dualisms of Western
thought make virtually impossible. “One value isolated from the unification of
values can become evil,” Manitou observes (“Langage” 14).9 For example, absolute
kindness or mercy or openness alone, unbalanced by judgment and discrimination,
risk inverting into their opposite, as the rabbinic statement from the Midrash above
so trenchantly expresses. The very rhetorical figure used in this saying, chiasmus,
(technically “antimetabole”) is a perfect match of form and content: chiasmus is
the parallel and reversal of terms. On an epistemological level, one indeed can only
express such an idea “rhetorically,” not in terms of syllogistic logic. (That inability
to reason about values and overcome dualisms using the methods of logical positivism and empiricism led Perelman to break with philosophy, rediscover and return
to rhetoric.)
As a rhetorical structure, chiasmus involves a “crossing over” of opposite terms,
like the χ shape of the Greek letter chi, after which it is named. In the midrash about
mercy and cruelty, the opposites cross over, interact, and “unite.” Chiasmus also occurs in the rabbinic statement included in the Manitou quotation used as the epigraph
to this essay: “[T]he one who receives, gives more to the one who gives, than the one
who gives to the one who receives.”10 He then applies it to the rhetorical situation,
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reformulating and breaking down the opposition of subject/object and speaker/audience to make it a dual reciprocity between the two terms giver and receiver:
In what’s happening right now, when I am speaking, I am the subject and you are the
object; and when you listen, I am the object and you are the subject. It’s necessary that
something reciprocal occurs, a restoration of the dignity of the other, as Kant said.
You have to receive in such a way that restores my dignity as the giver, but I have to
give in such a way that restores your dignity as receiver.
This “unification” of speaker and audience occurs not through the one-sided type
of persuasion of classical rhetoric (the speaker gives forth, and the audience receives
or is persuaded), but neither is it a Burkean “identification” of rhetor and audience.
Burke’s definition of identification partly entails his notion of consubstantiation, a term
borrowed from Latin Christian Christology to describe the ontological relations of
the persons of the Trinity (19–28, 55). In Judaism, no such consubstantiality exists
in the relation between God and the world, or the ethics of interhuman relation;
instead, there is a reciprocal interchange.
Manitou adds the following new sentence after the final one of our epigraph:
In Jewish thought, this is analyzed in relation to “the desire to receive” (ratzon lekabel)
and the “desire to bestow” (ratzon lehashpia) in distinguishing four situations: receive
in order to receive, receive in order to give, give in order to give, give in order to
receive. (“Le ‘cercle’ et la ‘droite’” 159)
He now moves the discourse to another level, using a fourfold schema of giver/receiver relations from the modern kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), whose
thought strongly influenced him. Something new also happens when the terms are
converted into this Jewish discourse: the receiver can give more to the giver than the
giver does to the receiver, a dualism is overcome, and a “unity of values” is achieved.
Each one of these four positions occurs on many levels—as types of relationship between God and the world, self and other, stages in human development,
philosophies of life. It’s worth noting here, by the way, that the word kabbalah itself
comes from the Hebrew verb “to receive” (kibel). Usually, kabbalah has the sense
of “received wisdom” or a tradition of “prophetic revelation” passed on orally from
teacher to student. But on another level, I prefer the definition I once heard from a
teacher of mine in Jerusalem: Kabbalah is itself the “wisdom of how to receive”—for
despite appearances, really knowing how to receive is much harder than knowing
how to give.
I have no space to discuss these ideas in much detail, but one-sided receiving—to “receive in order to receive”—is the position of the child or the egoist, or
a philosophy of self-enclosed, self-identical Being. To “give in order to receive” is
familiar, conventional morality (or a rhetoric of persuasion where a speaker tries
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to influence the audience for the speaker’s own benefit). The surprise is that the
highest stage in Ashlag’s schema is not to “give in order to give.” (That would also
parallel the second position in Manitou’s object/subject schema—I sacrifice myself
to give all). Although the desire to negate receiving has a positive motive, Manitou
sees it as a kind of adolescent idealism through which we all eventually need to pass.
For the need to receive should not be negated; it is also essential for existence. If we
did not eat, breathe, or draw a salary, for example, we would die. One who claims
to entirely negate the need to receive is either dishonest, or is committing suicide.
Nevertheless, for a mature, honest person to receive what is not merited causes
shame. How, then, is to “receive in order to give” the highest level? Think of the
common situation of arguing with a friend over who will pay for lunch. One could
follow any of the four positions: (1) simply accept the friend’s offer selfishly; (2) say,
“This time I will pay, but next time you pay”; (3) keep refusing, and insist on paying;
or (4) finally agree to let the friend pay because that will give her or him pleasure. In
this fourth option, the receiver becomes giver: that is, the motive for receiving now
comes from altruism rather than egoism, and the contradiction between those two
psychological tendencies is resolved.
So in the best rhetorical moment, the speaker not only has to “give” in such a
way as to restore dignity to the audience, but the audience has to “receive” in such a
way as to restore dignity to the speaker. Receiver and giver interchange. Pedagogically, this double dynamic also lies behind the famous talmudic saying, “Much have
I learned from my teacher, more from my fellow-students, but from my disciples
most of all” (Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 10a).
Of course, teacher and student, rhetor and audience can take up any of the other
positions, including those that foster domination, abuse, and violence. I have used
the word best here to mean the rhetorical situation or moment where the most ethical
and effective communication takes place. Perhaps the word climactic could serve as
well, because at its best and most ethical, or most “holy,” the sexual act embodies this
deep double reciprocity of giver and receiver. Indeed, this moving beyond dualism,
this unity of values, this attempt at reconciling what seems irreconcilable is Manitou’s
definition of holiness. But it is something beyond philosophical systems of dualistic
reason, and attainable through Jewish categories given in the Torah. Perhaps, then,
we could call it a Jewish “holy rhetoric.”
T h e N e w R h e t o r ic
and
J e w i s h R h e t o r ic
Perelman stated that he did not believe in any definitive divine revelations or mystical
intuitions (New Rhetoric 510). Nor was he well educated in Jewish sources, as were
Levinas or Manitou. But he was a strongly identified cultural Jew and Zionist who,
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later in life, came to see in talmudic forms of reasoning the modes of argument and
values he had sought to construct (Frank, “Jewish Countermodel” 178). I have space
here to add only a few comments in light of my earlier discussion.
What Perelman calls “a third way” beyond the dualisms of philosophy parallels
Manitou’s “unification of values.”11 For Perelman, the third way is enabled by rhetoric.
Though he would not use the word holy, written on Perelman’s gravestone is a quotation from the Bible: “Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut. 16:20). The urgency
of that pursuit had pressed him from the beginning of his career as a philosopher of
law, ethics, logic, and metaphysics to his work in the Belgian underground, and on to
composition of The New Rhetoric. The question was, how could one draw an “ought”
from an “is”? In his search to breach the gap, Perelman rediscovered Cicero, and
Aristotle’s dialectical, that is, informal, persuasive, practical reasoning: rhetoric. The
first page of The New Rhetoric announces Perelman’s aim: “to break with the concept
of reason and reasoning due to Descartes, which has set its mark on Western philosophy
for the last three decades” (emphasis in original). Formal, deductive, or Cartesian
reason was unable to solve the ambiguous and practical problems of value judgments
in morality, religion, and politics. Without a solution, these essential spheres risk
abandonment to “irrational forces, instincts, suggestion, or even violence” (3). In
rhetoric, Perelman found the middle way, or third way, to combat the
uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds
of absolutism: dualisms of reason and imagination, of knowledge and opinion, of
irrefutable self-evidence and deceptive will, of a universally accepted objectivity and
an communicable subjectivity, of a reality binding on everybody and values that are
purely individual. (510)
Here we return to the issue I have focused on throughout: rhetoric for Perelman is
that form of discourse dependent upon a relation to an other, adapted and addressed
to an audience. Its aim is “to act effectively on minds” and solicit non-coercive assent or “adherence,” which is given by a free, responsible decision of the listener
(7). Cartesian reason, by contrast, is based on solipsistic, self-evident truths with no
need for deliberation, or relation to others, or any possibility of withholding one’s
assent. So Perelman’s rhetoric also involves what he calls a “meeting of minds,” a
mutuality that creates a “bond” of community (Realm 9, 11).
This third way, between the compulsions of formal autonomous reason and
the coercions of violence, is also a middle path between skepticism and fanaticism.
In a stunning insight, Perelman shows these are not opposites, but flip sides of each
other. The fanatic “adheres to a disputable thesis for which no unquestionable proof
can be furnished,” refusing to submit it to any kind of free discussion or argument.
But isn’t the skeptic, then, the guardian against such violence? So much of the epistemological skepticism in postmodern thought rests on that ethical self-justification.
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But as Perelman points out, skepticism, like fanaticism,“equates adherence to a thesis
with recognition of its absolute truth” (New Rhetoric 62). In other words, the skeptic
thinks it is impossible to attain absolute truth; the fanatic claims she or he has it.
Neither is willing to allow for that middle way, a critical rationalism where—in the
absence of criteria or proof of absolute truth—adherence to a thesis involves a mutual
relation of respect, commitment, responsibility, and dignity via rhetorical forms of
argument and persuasion.
Though their discourses might seem far apart, both Perelman and Manitou
critique and move beyond classical philosophy, each using its own terms to undo
it differently. Each wrote out of an intense Jewish ethical sensibility and awareness
of the need for moral action. While writing this piece, I wondered, what would
have happened if Perleman and Manitou had ever personally met? Through one of
Manitou’s very close students who has transcripts of many unpublished oral lectures,
I found that they actually did. Manitou relates,
I remember that just after the war, the Brussels community asked me to come from
Paris to participate in a symposium to “counterbalance” Perelman. I did it in a room
packed with students, a terrible heat. [. . .] In two hours, I was able to turn the room
around [change their minds]. [. . .] Perelman then came to thank me and said, “I did
not know there were still any prêtres gaulois [“French priests”—a humourous compliment] left in France [. . .].” Then we discussed Judaism for two hours. Perelman was
one of the last great logicians.
In another talk, Manitou refers to a colloquium he attended with Perelman, who
spoke about Spinoza. This must have been the same event: “I remember this man
very well, who was a very great thinker, completely atheist, completely secular, very
Jewish. [. . .] but one wonders how.”12
Conclusion: Laughter
For that reason, from time to time, I make you laugh.
A Rabbi who does not laugh, is not a serious Rabbi.
—Manitou (qtd. in Aviner 15)
So the rabbi and the philosopher-rhetorican indeed did meet. They were not quite
sure what to make of each other, but their exchange embodies the principles of the
epigraph with which I began this essay: they mutually honored each other, and did
so with humor.13 Which leads me finally to the last line of the epigraph: “For that
reason, from time to time, I make you laugh.” What does laughter have to do with
all these deep philosophical discussions?
This has been a very serious essay—perhaps, as Manitou once put it, “too serious
to be serious” (“Parachat” 28). As he explains, with a typical French love of wordplay,
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I believe that Jewish humor is what has enabled us to endure through history. And
Jewish humor is not to take oneself too seriously. Because when one takes [se prendre]
one’s self too seriously, it prevents taking values seriously. For one takes one’s self [se
prendre] too seriously. (“Parachat” 28; emphasis added)
On one level, when a certain kind of shared laughter occurs between a speaker
and audience, it is indeed a “meeting of minds,” a mutual reciprocity, a bonding.
Laughter is a mutual pleasure where the giver and receiver become intermingled
and interchange positions, a moment of friendship. Laughter also comes from the
humility of our not knowing the all, not being able to have absolute knowledge. Each
tractate of the Talmud starts on page number two, not page one. A familiar Jewish
saying interprets this as teaching us that we can never master the whole, and we’re
always just beginning to understand.
Behind much of the seemingly serious and intense discussion of the rabbis in
the Jewish legal texts and biblical narrative, Manitou often senses a wink. On another level, the laughter comes from his Jewish sense of history as “a drama but not
a tragedy” (“Le couple” 209). Despite the vicissitudes and pain, history through the
generations has a meaning and God-given purpose toward which it moves. Humans
are tasked with pursuing justice, as Perelman so passionately did, or—in Manitou’s
terms—with creating a humanity capable of being a brother or sister to each other
. . . and to God, as it were. When that messianic goal is accomplished, history does
not end, but living really begins. So we could perhaps say that shared laughter is a
messianic moment, right in the here and now.
Punning again in French, Manitou also once said that commentary, commentaire,
is “comment”- “taire”: comment “how to” + taire “be silent” (qtd. in Koginsky 135).
I have taxed my reader with a very long and serious commentary on the epigraph
with which I began this essay. I’ve used it as a Jewish commentary on rhetoric and a
rhetorical commentary on Judaism. There’s so much more to say, but now it’s time
for me to be silent.
Notes
1. All translations from the French and Hebrew in this essay are mine. Although I quote from
only a few of the lectures and essays of Askénazi here, these ideas are developed across his many works,
especially in the two large volumes, La Parole et L’Écrit.
2. The word Manitou comes from the Anishnaabe language. It was customary in the French scouting
movement to give a “totem” name to those who had reached a certain stage in the movement—usually an
animal or sometimes a Walt Disney character. (Manitou’s wife, for example, was given the name Bambi.)
This name was meant to express the character of the person as experienced by the peer group. For those
who decided to give him this name at the initiation ceremony, it signified “the Great Chief”—which is
still its meaning in French professional slang. It is highly unlikely that they knew which Native American
language it came from, or its origin. In French, to be a “grand Manitou” in any field means to be the specialist, the one who knows and therefore leads. The scouts saw in him, even at a young age, the qualities
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of a spiritual leader, a Great Spirit. The full name given to him was actually Manitou Romantique: he was
“romantic” in having a passionate dream and intensely living it, as well as being a writer of poetry and songs.
I thank Elyakim Simsovic and Marcel Goldmann, his veteran students and editors, for this information
3. David Frank has written several outstanding essays on Perelman’s The New Rhetoric in relation to his
Jewish background. See his “Arguing with God,” “The Jewish Countermodel,” and “The New Rhetoric.”
4. Mostly negative comments about rhetoric are scattered throughout Levinas’s philosophical
works. I have written extensively about his thought in my book Fragments of Redemption, to which I refer
the reader. In one of his specifically Jewish writings—which he always tried to carefully separate from his
philosophical writings—Levinas discusses Greek rhetoric and its relation to Judaism. “Rhetoric is all that
is said too beautifully to leave us with what is true” (“Model” 27), a “weapon of ruse and domination.” But
he hints at the end of the essay to an alternative rhetoric, which he calls a “divine allurement.” That is
the Torah itself, he suggests, “a personal relation to the universal [. . .] where you draw near to him who
speaks to you personally. [. . .] It involves an element of seduction without deception, a rhetoric which
is holy opposed to the human rhetoric of pure humanism” (31–32). Levinas often said that his goal was
to “translate Jewish wisdom into Greek.” Manitou’s implicit critique is that the Jewish element becomes
lost in the translation, Hellenized. See especially Manitou’s essays “Y a-t-il une philosophie juive?” and
“Les nostalgies de Dieu” in La Parole et L’ Écrit, vol. 1 (29–40) and (41–54).
5. That multidimensional coalescence is characteristic of traditional rabbinic (and Christian) interpretation of scripture. The idea of the “fourfold meaning of scripture” is shared by both Jewish and
Christian hermeneutic traditions. The four levels may be defined roughly as the simple plain meaning, the
homiletic meaning, the allegorical meaning, and the mystical meaning. I have discussed this extensively
in my books The Slayers of Moses and Fragments of Redemption.
6. Coming from the Quaker spiritual tradition, the educational theorist Parker Palmer writes that
“to teach is to create a space.” This is a kind of “silence” or “desert” as he describes it, but also an act of
hospitality toward the student wherein one does not initially fill the space with the teacher’s own words
and self (69). Kabbalistic ideas of tzimtzum involve many other intricate processes, further contractions, concealments, and “emptying out” of God’s presence or light. There are also various levels and
worlds, “traces” and “lights” that are created and emanated after the contractions, and varying relations
of the “lights” to their containing “vessels,” and so forth. The main points for our purposes are (1) that
tzimtzum allows for God to create something “other,” while at the same time overcoming irreconcilable
philosophical dualisms; and (2) cosmology coincides with ethics—to make space for the other not only
as free gift, but also for the other to share in building creation through mending and completing it. I’ve
applied these ideas to the question of Jewish pedagogy in my essay “Knowledge Has a Face” (132–39).
7. The function of the teacher as transmitter of Torah in Jewish tradition also connects to the
relation between what is called Oral Torah and Written Torah: words transmitted “orally” and not
written down, and those written down (the Bible being an example of the latter). Roughly speaking, the
former is the ongoing interpretation and innovation through time. But Oral Torah also requires intense
personal contact between teacher and student—a living “discipleship” as it were; it is not just a matter
of “reading texts.” Or as Manitou puts it, “In the talmudic definition, a Teacher is not someone who has
students, but someone who has had a Teacher” (“Morale” 10). And “[t]he secret of the pedagogy of the
Torah is that greatest has to teach the smallest. This is the opposite of what happens in the university
[. . .] for, finally, the entire process of teaching Torah consists in being able to transform through wisdom
those who have the greatest need of it, and not those who have the least need” (“Morale” 21–22). So the
fact that much of Manitou’s work was oral teaching, and that the quote I am analyzing here is taken from
a written version of an oral lecture is highly significant on these other levels. I further address the nature
of this teacher-student relation in Jewish tradition in my forthcoming book, Make Yourself a Teacher:
Rabbinic Tales of Mentors and Disciples.
8. Manitou’s emphasis on a necessary “return to Hebrew” was a key part of the philosophical
method he learned from Jacob Gordin. This meant the “rehabiliation of the immediate intuitions of Jewish conciousness as a coherence of thought” (“Jacob Gordin” 14). That is, not placing the epistemology
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or philosophical-cultural heritage of Western thought as the higher criteria by which to then judge or
interpret Judaism, but to retain Jewish thought as primary, and then filter Western thought and other
cultures through it. Manitou also took the idea of history as engendrement from Gordin, who called it
“historiosophy” or the meaning of history according to the Hebrew prophets (“Jacob Gordin” 15–16).
9. Here one can begin to distinguish the kind of reciprocal relation with the other that Manitou is
proposing from Martin Buber’s I-Thou dialogue, which is based on a contentless, isolated, nontemporal
moment of absolute kindness. Manitou’s idea of the unification of values is a principle I have no space to
explain in depth; it is based on various sources and ideas, among them classic kabbalistic descriptions of
creation as patterned through the interactions of the ten sefirot, or divine attributes/emanations/values. It
is an inter-inclusivity, but not a dialectic. He views Kabbalah and its non-ontological cosmology as one
answer to the problems Greek philosophy poses. Hebrew monotheism is also for him a religion of unity,
not just in terms of belief in the One God, but also because its mission is this unification of values. That
indeed is the human task of mending the creation.
10. Two sources in the rabbinic midrash are found for this statement, both commenting on the verse
in Leviticus 25:25, “If your brother be waxen poor.” Midrash Rabbah Leviticus 38:4: “R. Yehoshua taught:
‘More than the master of the house does for the poor person, the poor person does for the master of the
house.’” The same chiastic saying is also found in the midrash on Ruth, Ruth Rabbah 5:9.
11. Perelman’s idea of the dissociation of concepts is also a brilliant rhetorical way of understanding how
those dualisms are generated in the first place (New Rhetoric 411–59). Manitou also calls the “unification
of values” a “third way” beyond dualisms (“L’Unité des valuers” 50).
12. I thank Elyakim Simsovic for finding these references for me in his archives of unpublished
transcripts of Manitou’s talks. The first quotation is from an undated course on the biblical chapters
Numbers: 30–32 (Parshat Matot), and the second from an undated seminar on “Abraham’s Family.” In
the latter, he refers to Perelman as “now deceased,” so the date must be after 1984 (email message to
the author, 3 Nov. 2009).
13. I am grateful to Janice Fernheimer for this insight.
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